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Archive for December, 2012

Convex optimization is a mature technology and given the experience and work of Vandenberghe who is the figure behind cvxopt, it is valuable to extract the language from the function prototypes of cvxopt. In the function prototypes below, the meanings of the variable names, c, G,P, q,h, A, b and in some cases Gs, hs, are all fixed. In particular, this is useful to begin a REST API for convex optimization that we will implement for http://www.cvxcloudopt.com

I would like a middleware that takes a dictionary of url patterns and python functions and produces a Django web app suite. The key issue is to contain the GUI chaos within this layer, possibly parametrizing styles like C++ template traits. Such an exercise should essentially trivialize web deployment without hassle from the GUI and HTML that act as a time sink.

Piston seems at first glance to be extremely useful for this project. A blog descriping experience with piston/Django I found helpful is here. Further research showed that experienced coders prefer tastypie over piston.

Django is a tool that allows python developers to view websites as an array of function pointers to a set of functions that in the Django lingo are called ‘views’. Django maintains the mapping between url regular expressions and their corresponding functions in files named ‘urls.py’ in directories of the website, and more details can be found here on the sequence that Django checks to determine which function to call when an url is reached within the django url tree.

Django does not come with a minimal example of an upload-file application but Akseli Palen was nice enough to provide a full example. A basic example application I have had in mind for cvxcloudopt.com is that of mass spec operators for whom we can do both signal processing of mass spectra as well as compound identification. We have to leverage the facilities for file upload that Django provides without excessively additional development time. We should answer the question of what is the simplest, most intuitive, and hassle-free method that users can employ in terms of file import.

We can expect users to have their data in various forms of disorganization and we need to give them a simple uncomplicated method of specifying the data sources. Obviously we need the ability then to handle: single file but also perhaps all files in a directory matching a regular expression pattern.

The universe is an eternal sphere of four macroscopic spatial dimensions and for those of us with open third eyes — yes the pineal gland, stupidly classified to have the function of a ‘biological clock’ is an eye looking to the fourth dimension — can easily surmise that the 4-sphere universe can be identified with psyche. Human beings are four dimensional sentient symbolic beings. It is true that we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees and that chimpanzees are intelligent creatures but human beings are not very much like chimpanzees. Human technology is not a particularly good metric to understand our difference from primates like chimpanzees. Chimpanzees do not produce empires. Chimpanzees have not produced symbolic religions which we know human beings have done from even the earliest known humans. Stupidity of the empiricists have led to theories such as Julian Jaynes on the origin of consciousness in the ‘breakdown of the bicameral mind’ whose ridiculousness can be understood when it is asked seriously how modern man is any more conscious on average than the so-called ‘bicameral kingdoms’ of the past. Nietzsche’s digging into the issue of the birth of tragedy in Greece does not show such assumptions of unconsciousness.

Cvxopt is an open source python convex optimization package. This note concerns some technical problems that arise when attempting a straightforward implementation of the following optimization problem:

Min ||X||_* subject to A*vec(X) = y

Here X is an RxC matrix and ||.||_* represents the nuclear norm or the sum of the singular values of X. Recht, et. al. describe the connection of this convex problem and the rank minimization problem with the same constraint which is not convex and is NP-hard. Interesting applications of this problem include the ‘matrix completion problem’ and some theory can be found here. Now this problem is equivalent to the following convex problem which has a linear objective function:

The following is a part of an interview by TRNN of investigative journalist Gareth Porter:

PORTER: Well, I can very quickly give my overview of that issue of how drones affect U.S. national security by saying that I have written in the past, as have other journalists—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London in particular have written about how the drone strikes in Pakistan have in fact killed large numbers of civilians. They are not discriminate in the way in which the Obama administration has claimed in the past, very clearly. And if you look at the statistics, even those that are kept by the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., which are based on rather misleading reports in the U.S. news media and in Pakistani news media, and which therefore basically consider—anyone who is called a militant in these news reports is listed in these statistics as a militant, and therefore could not be, supposedly, a civilian, whereas in fact we know that the Obama administration has—since the beginning, in 2009, has considered anyone who is a military-age male in the vicinity of a drone strike who gets killed as a militant. That is the automatic way of categorizing anyone in that situation. And therefore the only people that are considered to be civilians in the statistics that have been kept have been women and children. And that means that hundreds of men who are not combatants but who are killed in these strikes have in fact been civilians. And that has been a major aspect of the policy that the U.S. news media has still not covered adequately.So I think that this is a very serious problem for the United States, and I can tell you that the population of the FATA region, the tribal region of Pakistan where these strikes are being carried out, are adamantly against them, overwhelmingly against them, even though they’re also overwhelmingly opposed to the Pakistani Taliban. So this is a point of view that is shared overwhelmingly. It is shared by people who are the victims of these strikes, whose lives have been very adversely affected by the strikes, and this makes the United States even more unpopular than it was in Pakistan. And the rest of the population of Pakistan outside these regions are even more opposed to the United States than in the regions themselves. So we have a very serious problem in Pakistan that the U.S. government and the two parties have not even begun to seriously tackle.And this is another cost, I’m afraid, of this two-party system, that a policy that is very clearly adversely affecting the security of the United States is not being adequately debated, it is not being given the consideration that it deserves, because—as I said at the outset: that the two parties have gotten used to lying to the American people to a degree that makes it impossible for debates to take place, even in a presidential year, when it’s so important that we understand what the real positions are of the candidates who are running for president and what their implications are for the American people. And I think that is a problem that now has to be given an extremely high priority by people who care about the future of this country. It’s time to really think much more seriously about what is wrong with the two-party system, what needs to be done about it. And I think, you know, obviously the need for other parties, at least a third party, must be high on the political agenda in this country.

Jayne writes: ‘The most plausible hypothesis is that verbal hallucinations were a side effect of language comprehension which evolved by natural selection as a method of behavioral control.’

While this may sound sophisticated, this is total bullshit. In 2008 in one among many metaphysical experiences, I remember hearing someone yell out to me, ‘Ahriman!!!!’. I can assure you that it had nothing to do with ‘side effect of language comphrehension which evolved by natural selection’. These people are so clueless it boggles the mind. To understand just how ludicrous this idea of his is, consider the example of Nietzsche, one of the virtuoso writers of modern west, speak of not simply of auditory hallucination but directly communicating with Dionysus during the height of his powers, in Beyond Good and Evil, section 295.